How Open Collective Uses Wise Business to Automate Payments Around the World - A Case Study

Open Collective works with communities, from mutual aid groups, climate activists, free software projects and more, providing the legal and financial tools to let these groups focus on their missions without worrying about excessive bureaucracy. In total, Open Collective helped +15000 groups raise and manage +105 million USD.

Helping community groups automate payments to move money to where it’s needed is key to Open Collective’s work. Read on to learn how Open Collective partners with Wise Business to automate international payments, in 40+ currencies with the mid-market exchange rate and low, transparent fees.

If you're a business sending more than 100,000 GBP (or equivalent) monthly across different currencies, get in touch with the Wise Business sales team to discuss the best solutions for your needs.

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Story of Open Collective

Founded by Pia Mancini, Xavier Damman, and Aseem Sood, Open Collective came about following Pia’s move from politics to tech. From political experience, Pia and Xavier had seen activist groups, social and political movements, climate activists, open source projects and other similar change makers being excluded from some aspects of politics and contributing to society, often because they weren’t legal entities and so struggled to raise and distribute funds in the most impactful way possible.

The core mission of Open Collective is making communities sustainable, increasing participation and allowing groups and communities of individuals who are working together to make positive changes to do so in their own way. This means finding ways to allow groups to continue to flourish without necessarily needing to push them into an off-the-shelf model of how a non-profit group or entity should be set up.

One of the options Open Collective offers to facilitate this is the fiscal host network, which includes legal entities based in the US, UK, Europe, New Zealand and more, which community groups can apply to, to operate under this legal umbrella rather than having to incorporate as a separate entity. Open Collective also offers easy ways for groups to manage their finances transparently - essential when building trust and raising awareness of causes and activities.

One of the useful features provided by Open Collective is to enable groups moving money from the centre to the fringes. Open Collective is at the core, bringing together the tech platform and a network of fiscal hosts of nonprofits around the world that receive the money for all of these groups. This, says Pia, creates a way of funding these communities at scale without forcing them to incorporate as their own legal entities, which could simply be an unnecessary distraction pulling them away from making positive changes in their community.

Open Collective challenge: automate payments around the world

As we’ve mentioned, Open Collective has ways for community groups to automate global payments. As a business employing dozens of people, Open Collective also needs its own way to automate business payments and run payroll. In both cases, Open Collective chose Wise Business as the solution.

Pia explains that their original payment solution was PayPal. However, this had its drawbacks.

Integrating with Wise Business also brought efficiency savings for Open Collective.

“Before integrating Wise API to our platform we were using it manually, we would create a transaction in our platform and then execute it manually within Wise account, and then we decided to integrate Wise’s API to the platform to automate the payments."

By using the Wise API, Open Collective was able to cut down on admin time and automate more global payments. And because Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate and low, transparent fees, there are cost benefits, too.

Wise Business positive impact on Open Collective challenges

Ultimately, by moving to partner with Wise, Open Collective has been able to work more efficiently. And by using the Wise API to make it easier than ever to move money around the world, Open Collective has also been able to scale and bring their products and benefits to more community groups around the world.

Here’s what Pia says:

“Wise is magic, it is very easy to send money in a very cheap way, your mission speaks for itself and it is well executed. Right in the beginning the collectives and fiscal hosts that we would work with were in the US and us as Open Collective, the team was all around the world. So we needed to pay our staff as well and Wise was such a no-brainer to send money to like five different countries.”

💡Learn more about Wise Business

Perhaps the most transformational thing was implementing the Wise Business API solution. Now, with easier ways to move money globally, Open Collective works with more people and organisations - providing an essential service for people trying to support their community in different ways.

“Also our platform has scaled a lot since implementing the Wise API. We are a 50 person team considering the fiscal hosts, there is no way we would have enough people to do this work manually. I see a correlation between the implementation of Wise as a payment method and our ability to scale in the last two/ three years.”

Want to do more with Wise Business?

You’ll get all of these handy features with Wise, too:

• Hold 40+ currencies, send payments to 80+ countries, and get local bank details for 9 currencies
• Get business debit and expense cards for yourself and your team, for spending in 170+ countries
• Exchange currencies with low, transparent fees and the mid-market exchange rate
• Make batch payments to 1,000 people at a time - ideal for employee payroll or when paying contractors
• Automate workflow with the Wise API
• Add and manage user permissions so everyone in your team has the tools they need to do their job

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Pricing/fees: Please see Terms of Use for your region or visit Wise Fees & Pricing for the most up to date pricing and fee information

Open Collective is a mission driven organisation which helps changemakers around the world do more by giving them ways to raise and manage funds legally and without unnecessary admin. If you’re wondering how to automate payments for your business, it’s good to know that with Wise you can send money to 160+ countries, with the mid-market exchange rate and low, transparent fees. Join businesses like Open Collective, benefiting from the low costs and ease of use offered by Wise Business.